Tangle Tech

“It’s not red,” IBM’s design center manager patiently explained. “It’s magenta.” The safety function officer wasn’t buying it. Between his fingers, he held up a small, rubbery disc that looked like a pencil eraser. “You know it’s red and I know it’s red,” he said. The design manager didn’t back down. He insisted that what the man held was indeed magenta. The safety officer called his boss. The boss called Tom Hardy, Design Program Director at IBM. Hardy didn't flinch. “It’s not red. It’s magenta.” It was one of the boldest lies ever told in tech. And it made the ThinkPad iconic. Years later, Hardy relayed the incident in an interview with Laptop Retrospective, detailing the design origins of the TrackPoint, the input stick resting in a central position of the ThinkPad keyboard since 1992. Instantly recogni...

It starts on the 4 Train, that straight-run subway line from Grand Central to Yankee Stadium, where I start to notice the red shirts. By the time I reach the massive gray stadium, people are circling the Bronx Bomber’s edifice like thousands of red ants, all queuing up for a rare baseball season sight: football (soccer) in Yankee Stadium. Most of the shirts are for Premier League side Liverpool FC, but there's a smattering of Wrexham kits. Some of them look threadbare, and none feature the club’s newest sponsor: Firefox. The travel and away kits were unveiled just days before — too soon for die-hard fans to show their support for the team and its well-known but, by some measures, marginal web browser. Walking through Babe Ruth Plaza, I follow behind the red shirts until I’m lined up behind fans who have come from as far as Arkansas and California to witness the pre-season match. None are mus...

Amazon plans to launch 5,105 satellites to support new mobile networks The filing with the FCC highlights voice, data, emergency services, and Internet of Things support Amazon Leo already has over 390 satellites in orbit, enough to launch the plans ahead of the full deployment Amazon has confirmed its “low Earth orbit” (LEO) satellite network has submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deploy a constellation of 5,105 satellites which will provide voice, data, messaging, emergency services access, and Internet of Things support for under the Amazon Leo Direct-to-Device (D2D) project. The application follows Amazon’s merger with Globalstar, acquiring the US satellite telecommunications company’s operations, infrastructure, and global licenses and authorizations. This step into orbit will see Amazon Leo’s existing satellites work alongside the Globalstar HIBLEO an...

Some mild spoilers for The Odyssey ahead. Normally, when my TikTok FYP causes me to experience an extreme case of FOMO, I do something I regret. That's ranged from buying something cheap and tacky on TikTok Shop to queueing for hours to get sub-par food at a restaurant that influencers say is my area's "best-kept secret". But that losing streak has ended with The Odyssey in 4DX. If you've been active on social media in the last two weeks, you might have come across the many viral videos of cinema-goers having popcorn knocked out of their hands while their chair moves at a million miles a minute in Troy, and being sprayed in the face during one of the many seen featuring Odysseus (Matt Damon) at sea. At first, I thought these clips were performative. I hate the idea that filming in theaters has become as commonplace as it has (which is why I won't be sharing any of those...

Robot vacuums have been around for many years, and modern bots are cleverer and more helpful than ever. But while they are getting more popular, they seem to be struggling to properly break through to the mainstream. See a robot vacuum in someone's house, and you'd probably still remark on it. The aim for robovac brands must be to at some point overtake manual vacs as the general public's dust-sucker of choice — so why isn't that happening? I rounded up representatives from some of the best robot vacuum brands to get their take. I wanted to learn more about the misconceptions that brands are still fighting against, how perceptions of these handy puck-shaped home helpers has changed, and what challenges still remain if robovacs are going to truly hit the mainstream. Get with the times "Robot vacuums are gradually being accepted and adopted by the public, rather than being tre...

Even without being directly tied to The Big Bang Theory , there's an incredibly satisfying reason for why fans should invest in new HBO Max spinoff Stuart Fails to Save the Universe : how returnable it is. By that, I mean the comedy series could easily run for five, 10, or even a million more seasons and not dip in quality or have any continuity issues. Because there's an infinite number of universes to explore, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe could be taken in any number of zany directions and still make complete sense. In an age where high-quality TV shows are often being axed before they've been in streamable orbit for more than a month, the idea of this alone is refreshing. However, I do have an ulterior motive for wanting Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady and Zak Penn's latest creation to last for as long as possible. Given enough time, I think that Stuart Fails to Save the Univers...

One of the biggest problems with book recommendations is that they're usually too obvious. I don't need another list of books to read after The Lord of the Rings , or someone telling me to try Brandon Sanderson because I like fantasy. I wanted recommendations based on the strange mixture of books I actually enjoy — ones that felt personal, not algorithmic. So I gave ChatGPT my bookshelf. Metaphorically, at least. Rather than asking for recommendations straight away, I told ChatGPT to learn my reading taste first. I started listing favorite authors and books, then asked it to quiz me about others I'd forgotten. It wanted to know what I'd enjoyed about particular novels, whether I'd read similar authors, and even the rough timeline of when I'd discovered them, building a picture of the books that had shaped me. I also gave it some ground rules. It should avoid obvious reco...

China’s latest ChatGPT rival, Kimi , is now available for download on the Apple App Store, so I downloaded it on my iPhone, intending to test it against ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. I had the prompts ready; I had the comparison planned. Then Kimi presented me with a very modern problem that I wasn’t expecting: too many people were already trying to talk to it. This is not just app-launch inconvenience. It captures one of the biggest problems in AI right now: being clever is one thing, but the best models are only useful if companies have enough servers and GPUs to allow people to actually use them. In our recent Kimi review we said: "Kimi delivers impressive performance for coding, document analysis, and multi-step agentic tasks, especially considering its price point." Kimi may be positioned as a serious open-weight rival to US models, but if the first ordinary-user experience is that...

I've spent the better part of a month filming everything from product close-ups to run-and-gun vlogs on my iPhone 17 Pro Max, and two accessories have completely changed how that footage looks and sounds: the DJI Osmo Mobile 8 gimbal and the DJI Mic Mini wireless microphone . Individually, neither breaks new ground. But linked through DJI’s OsmoAudio ecosystem, they target the two quickest giveaways of amateur filmmaking at once: shaky movement and poor audio. Why the Osmo Mobile 8 makes iPhone footage look intentional (Image credit: Future) The Osmo Mobile 8 is one of DJI's smartphone gimbals, and the headline upgrade over its predecessor is 360-degree pan rotation. That means you can track a subject through a full 360-degree spin without hitting a mechanical dead-end mid-take. It seems incremental on paper, but eliminating that rotational hard stop saves you from constantly having to p...

Jetkiller reaches 370 km/h to chase faster Russian Shahed attack drones The original P1-SUN reportedly destroyed more than 5,500 Russian drones already SkyFall plans serial production of the upgraded interceptor beginning in August 2026 Ukrainian drone manufacturer SkyFall has unveiled the P1-SUN Jetkiller, an upgraded interceptor built to counter Russia's jet-powered Shahed attack drones. The new model made its public debut at the recent Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom. According to Reuters , the Jetkiller reaches a top speed of 370 km/h, up from 310 km/h on the standard P1-SUN. A solution to Russia's jet-powered Shaheds Russia has begun fitting some Shahed attack drones with jet engines instead of propellers, allowing speeds of up to 500 km/h, which significantly narrows the window Ukrainian air defenses have to detect and intercept incoming drones. Yurii Chereva...

A strong password is sometimes the only thing standing between your accounts and a hacker, so it's well worth investing time into creating unique passwords. Trying to remember all of these passwords can be tricky (or downright impossible if you've got a lot of accounts) – but that's exactly why password managers are so useful. Password managers store your login credentials securely, ensuring that only you can access them, and can even help you generate complex passwords with a click of a button. Better yet, some password managers alert you if they detect weak or reused passwords, and can even search for personal details that might've been leaked to the dark web during a data breach. There are a lot of password managers available, however, and they're not all as trustworthy as they claim to be. It's why the TechRadar team has spent time testing and reviewing more than 30 of...